The Duke of Wellington and Lord Nelson. 175 



characteristic of that hardy constitutional energy which had led 

 the Duke to persist in fulfilling an engagement through all diffi- 

 culties and at all hazards, that when Mr. Butler invited him to 

 alight and warm himself he declined the invitation with thanks, 

 observing that he was very well as he was ; though at the same 

 time another gentleman, who was travelling in the carriage with 

 him, very gladly accepted the invitation. 



Mr. Butler further informed me that there was no traffic on the 

 road for at least twenty-four hours after the Duke had thus made 

 his way through. 



HE following incident in the life of the first Lord Nelson, 

 which has never, I believe, appeared in print, has not the same 

 local claim to a place in your Magazine ; and yet as his sister, Mrs. 

 Bolton, was connected by property and residence with Wilts, and 

 further as our county contains the family estate and residence 

 which his gallantry won as a reward from his country, the story 

 is not altogether inappropriate in your pages. 



In the summer of 1856 I was staying at Felixstow on the 

 Suffolk coast, when there was living at Ipswich a very aged man, 

 Abraham Cook, who was then a pensioner of H. M. Customs in 

 which he had served for thirty years, and who in early life had been 

 valet to the father of Lord Nelson at the Rectory of Burnham- 

 thorpe: he related the following circumstance. The father of Lord 

 Nelson had been in the habit of spending his winters at Bath in 

 the latter part of his life ; and it was there that after Lord Nelson 

 had taken leave of his father before setting out for Copenhagen, 

 he turned round to this Abraham Cook, and slipping a five pound 

 note into his hand said, " Cook, mind you take good care of my 

 father whilst I am away." 



Now your readers may remember that one of the first, if not the 

 first of Lord Nelson's acts of daring as exhibited in a painting in 

 the hall of Greenwich Hospital, portrays him as a young Midshipman 

 in pursuit of a bear on the ice of the north sea, and that it is 

 recorded of him that when he was remonstrated with on the mad- 

 ness of his act, he accounted for it by saying, " oh, I thought his 



